This is The Captain

‘Fine Time’ by New Order
New Order’s best album

Breathing

carroboscis:

 “Don’t, don’t, don’t let’s start. This is the worst…John? What are you doing?”

            Johns Linnell and Flansburgh were in the former’s apartment, playing keyboard and guitar respectively. Their current focus was on a song Linnell had written, entitled “Don’t Let’s Start”. However, Flansburgh, who should have been playing the guitar but was instead standing very close to Linnell and not doing anything in particular, was quite possibly taking the title of Linnell’s song too literally.

i can’t believe this

prozd:

dennys:

Could you finish an entire Lumberjack Slam?

Yes.

What - do you have to eat the tree stump as well? This doesn’t look that hard!

‘RE: Your Brains’ by Jonathan Coulton
This recording is the first time I ever saw anyone I liked playing live.

‘Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)’ by Daft Punk
We need more disco!

I was picking flowers for about an hour when a coyote came out of nowhere and ate me. Then when I woke up I no longer had flowers.

‘Pictures Of You’ by The Cure is my new jam.

I completed the game on Tuesday.

Sheesh, if there’s one thing Breath of Fire is it’s long. I’m not sure how many hours it took me, but even if you doubled the walking speed and halved the amount of random encounters I’d still be looking at about fourty hours for first playthrough.

This game is huge, and it loves its JRPG tropes (though I don’t know whether it’s following or creating a trend in ‘93, I’m going to guess following). All the popular half-species like human/birds and human/fish make up your party, with a human/dragon lead character. Even the one 100% human man in your party has a special ability to fuse with his teammates. Aside from that, you have your hometown destroyed in the opening, six mystical keys to collect and a typical unleash goddess/apocalypse finale scattered with generic side stories. This in itself isn’t so bad, but either the writing or the translation are horrendous.

Each act of the game sees you thrown into the middle of a story - which could be a good thing so long as you’re given directions on where to go next - but doesn’t have optional backstory to find out why you’re doing what you’re doing. Each town has its rivalries or enemies, but you never find out why. Furthermore, when you complete a segment, you’re not left with an idea of where to go next or a reminder of what it is you were doing before getting distracted. It doesn’t help that while the game map is huge, each discovery of a new location quickly sends you back two towns to retrieve an item.

The impressive scope of the gameworld is limited by a lack of context or variety in the writing so despite the large number of races everyone speaks with the same voice. Dialogue seems to be incomplete - with jokes missing setups or punchlines. The limited number of words extends to the menu system, a clunky interface with poor descriptions. Trying to find out what an item does and then use it requires going through two different menus. Not good when there’s a character limit which makes item names obscure, and worse when items like Mrbl1 and Mrbl3 have two very different uses.

The bland voice wasn’t the only thing that got monotonous. The graphics are nice and clean (though restricted to movement across tiles) but repeated. Music too, is excellent, but there are a limited number of tracks that repeat quickly. The worst offender is the world map, a great tune hampered by a long string intro. The intro’s so long and the random encounter rate so high that it rarely finishes before you’re into a battle - infuriating!

Still, the fighting is the saving grace of the game. With eight characters with various abilities the room for experimentation is high. I found my personal party preference without too much hassle, but if I wanted to liven things up there were plenty of other strategies to experiment with. Unfortunately, bosses are too high stake to take risks with, but your two power characters were unbeatable with a healer in your party. A little more balance and it could have been perfect.

Despite how negative I’ve been in this review, I should say this is one of a very, very few JRPGs I’ve played to completion. I think I eventually became numb to how average it was, but there was never a point I became TOO frustrated or TOO bored. The lack of depth, but huge scope, in writing let me put my own imagination into the world.

That said, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

‘The Good Life’ by Weezer
More Weezer forever